Creating an employee wellness programme is one of the most effective ways to reduce staff absence, improve retention, boost productivity, and foster a happy, healthy culture.
Think about it; an employee wellness programme that works means your staff are healthy so have less time off sick. They are happy and cared for, so they don’t seek a different job. They are full of energy and engaged, so they work hard and consistently. And they are all doing this together, so your workplace culture is supportive and health driven.
Sounds amazing, right?
But how do you make sure that your employee wellness programme is amazing?
Follow our 10 simple tips below and you will be the proud leader of a healthy, happy, and well team in no time!
1) Evaluate Your Current Workplace
Take a long, hard, and honest look at your staff, their environment, your policies, and their tasks before you start to plan your wellbeing programme.
Set out some questions you want to find the answer to.
How engaged are your staff? What are the current absence levels like? What are you doing well? Where can you improve?
2) Involve Your Team
When you carry out your workplace wellbeing audit you should involve your team.
They are the people you are trying to support, help, and motivate, so it is obvious that they should be asked!
But it is more than that. Giving your staff ownership of the corporate wellness programme means they are more likely to see the benefit, use it, and advocate for it.
Plus, an amazing employee wellness programme will address all their pain points, enhance their enjoyment of the job, and solve their niggly work problems. Yours will be a tailor-made programme.
3) Inclusivity Is Key
An employee wellness programme will only be amazing if it is suitable for everyone.
Not everyone wants to run every day. Not everyone can take the stairs instead of the lift. Some people can’t afford even discounted gym membership. Some people function just fine on 5 hours of sleep a night. Some need more. Everyone is different and an amazing wellbeing scheme will suit everyone.
Provide plenty of options and allow people to work towards being their best, not what the programme says is the best.
The Wellspace wellbeing app, for example, tailors activity and sleep goals to the individual. Rather than giving them an arbitrary goal, it measures a baseline and encourages them to work up from there. It rewards engagement, rather than results so it is suitable for everyone and includes everyone.
4) Rewards Not Punishments
This one is simple. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work out that people respond better to rewards, not punishments.
Reward your employees with an extra day off, a monthly treat, vouchers, or discounted services for their engagement in the wellbeing programme.
Here at Wellspace, we work with you to help you create a bespoke rewards programme for your employees. This is way more than employee perks-this is encouragement and rewards for engaging with their own health and wellbeing.
5) Make Your Employee Wellness Programme Holistic
An awesome employee wellbeing programme looks at more than health, sleep and stress.
Consider all the other things that might make your employee unsafe, unwell, or unhappy.
Are your workplace policies too restrictive? Are workloads manageable so staff get plenty of downtime? Are their wages fair and reasonable?
Be sure you consider every aspect of your staff’s wellbeing when devising and implementing your employee wellbeing strategy.
6) Make It Optional
No one likes to be told what is good for them! Enforced engagement in a wellbeing programme is likely to be met with suspicion and resistance, especially if your staff are currently feeling quite negative or disillusioned with the workplace.
Selling the benefits, rewards, and community side of the programme is more likely to get take-up than forcing it on people.
7) Provide Opportunities For Improvement
A good corporate wellbeing programme will give staff data and insight into what they can improve to make them healthier, happier, and more energetic.
An amazing corporate wellbeing programme will give them the tools to improve, too.
Here at Wellspace we offer an absolutely fantastic training service, such as intensive 1-on-1 sessions with a trained coach or counsellor, to quick ‘lunchtime bites’ sessions and more general wellbeing, large scale sessions.
We will even create a bespoke training package that addresses the results from the app use.
8) Adapt and Change Through Data
The Wellspace employee wellness solution is data-driven, just like any amazing solution.
When employees use the app, you can use the platform to aggregate and configure the data to see when staff are more alert, when they are most stressed, which group of individuals are least engaged and so on.
You can use the data to tailor your specific activity and initiatives as often as you like.
If, for example, you notice all of finance are recording high levels of stress around end of the financial year (understandable) you can extend their lunch break, bring in an extra member of staff, increase rewards, stagger starting times, or even just go and have a chat with them.
An amazing employee wellness solution uses data to allow you to tailor your response and approach.
9) Promote And Encourage Play And Relaxation
A good work/life balance is one of the cornerstones of good mental health. But a ‘good’ work/life balance is different for different people.
We have all worked somewhere where the culture is one of constant graft. Long days, short lunch breaks, emails in personal time, no conversation, no fun!
It is miserable.
As this article points out, studies have shown that play and relaxation time at work benefits productivity, reduces absenteeism and presenteeism, and helps to address stress at work.
Allowing time for relaxation and downtime at work and not expecting work outside of work time will take your employee wellness plan from average to amazing!
10) Give Wellspace A Call
Here at Wellspace we have carefully crafted a fully holistic, data-driven corporate wellbeing solution.
We can help you from the moment you realise the culture or health and wellness in your workplace is off.
From coming in to help you audit your workplace, to creating a bespoke programme, training staff on improving every aspect of their wellbeing and providing technology to enable staff to track their own health, we have you covered. And the benefits speak for themselves.
If you would like to see how we can help your workplace to be amazing, get in touch on
0808 178 0748 or get in touch with us here.
